A Lewisian Year

[scrubjayspeaks]

Presented in partnership with the Lewisia Communications Board and Lewisia Public Library

Sponsored by The Historical Society

Hello, readers, listeners, and psychic osmosizers! Welcome to A Lewisian Year, a monthly showcase celebrating the rich culture here in the Lake Lewisia district. Each month, we'll highlight some seasonal events, local celebrations and interpretations of national and world holidays, and historical tidbits.

JULY

Firebird Eggs

It's a blazing hot day in the deep of summer, and you, unfortunately, have to go outside. If you were lucky, you would be headed to the lake, where the water keeps the ambient temperature a little lower, or into the woods, where the closeness of the air is offset by the relief of shade. But no. You're headed out to the Hawberry Flats area on the northeast of town, where a spread of glacier-flattened prairie gives the sunshine ample room to bake the grass and the people golden brown.

As you walk, relishing every small patch of shade that crosses your path, you notice a bush up ahead. It's small, and tangled with undergrowth around the base, and gently smoking. You blink and rub the sweat from your eyes. It's probably just heat haze, you think. When you look again, the smoke seems a little thicker, curling steadily upward in the still air.

You get closer to investigate, leaning to look inside. A pulse of heat washes up into your face. Down at the base of the bush, there is a nest built of grass and small sticks--built of tinder--and heaped up around the edges like a well-made campfire. There, in the heart of the fire-to-be, is a single, deep red egg. As you watch, it jostles side to side. And then...it ignites, flame bursting from a crack where the creature inside has started to break out into the world. A new firebird is born.

Not every summer boasts a hatching like this. No one knows for sure what makes a year right for newborn firebirds. (Firebird, phoenix, and sunbird are all commonly used, more or less interchangeably, though you can get a folklorist or a biologist going for hours on the finer points distinguishing the terms.) Heat, certainly, plays a part. It's thought that the slow, uneven incubation of firebirds has something to do with the availability of resources to support them. Not just any environment can sustain a population of large, intermittently flammable, quasi-immortal avians.

Summer Pests

Of course, not all creatures brought out by the heat are as welcome as newly-hatched firebirds. Heat, lack of water, and rapidly dwindling supplies of plant life can drive any number of small pests into homes and yards at this time of year. While we may have sympathy for their plights, it does become difficult to keep that in mind when you catch something scurrying behind the refrigerator every time you turn on the kitchen lights. Outside of Lewisia, people can expect an influx of flies, ants, and mice if they live anywhere near agricultural areas or open fields. Deserts get their visitations of snakes and scorpions. Here, though, the pests can run a bit more exotic, if not necessarily more hazardous.

Salamanders--the flaming kind, not the aquatic ones--start an estimated ten percent of minor brush fires every year. (The aquatic ones are more notorious for engaging in confidence games and small-time grifting.) Parasitic wasps here include dream- and memory-eating varieties, which can make napping while at the family cookout particularly fraught. Nothing can tear up a garden or lawn like an infestation of wolpertingers, which manage to molt, burrow, build nests, and scrape their antlers on anything that stays stationary longer than two minutes.

A particularly hardy clan of house brownies is said to have domesticated a strain of these chimerical garden pests, which I can only imagine comes as a mixed blessing for the humans sharing homes with them. Contracts with fae are not, in fact, the most exotic method used to manage unwanted wildlife. (Fairy knights jousting against a scorpion are a sight to behold, and may be well worth the sacrifice of blood favors.) Some chemical deterrents are available, but most people focus on making their living spaces less inviting to unwanted creatures. Then there are the homes that lean into the aesthetics of their unplanned tenants: the old Birchhead Manor, following its moat expansion, positively revels in the arrival of a fresh crop of Silent Gillmen (Hyla grendeliana) every spring.

Convention Season

If the outdoors are getting you down, you can always head inside to one of the many conventions taking place this summer. With people taking vacations from school and work and the weather generally stable-if-sweltering, summer is the preferred season for conventions. From international book festivals to small-town catch-all pop culture street fairs, almost anywhere is within reasonable travel of almost any interest's yearly gathering.

If there's one thing Lewisians love, it's any kind of celebration of niche interests and fanatical hobbies. Lewisia has previously hosted the Haunted Doll Collectors Society for their national event, multiple years of Weaver Weekend, and alternate years in a shared custody arrangement with the Ghostly Congress for "Afterlife the Convention." Local businesses enjoy the uptick in visitors and local people-watchers enjoy the free show of attendees going to and from the Event Center.

Plenty of conventions hosted away from Lewisia and her sister cities will still see a number of Lewisian attendees. December and January usually see a rush of organizing groups to purchase hotel room blocks and travel tickets as soon as convention badges go up for advance sale. Some of our local artists regularly tour around these outside conventions' Artist Alleys. Three current residents of Lewisia, in fact, owe their first contact with the town and eventual move here to artists at conventions.

Conventions that welcome cosplayers offer a particular advantage to Lewisians with more unusual body types. There has been an informal competition here in town for many years among non-human and semi-humanoid residents to craft elaborate cosplay costumes that allow them to walk in broad daylight among people who have no idea that ambulatory plants or marsupial darkness exist. Divisions within this competition include:

costumes designed to obscure the body entirely (popular with quadrupeds and others with body plans laid out more on the horizontal than the vertical);

costumes based on fictional versions of real species (werewolves and snake- or fish-based creatures leading the field);

and mundane cosplay that tries to accurately mimic standard human features and forms on non-standard bodies (dominated for three years running by a cephalopodic resident with a special knack for textural camouflage).

This Month in History

July 24th, 1999, is the most recent confirmed sighting of the fairy ball in the Lewisia area. While fairies are, obviously, common sights in Lewisia and elsewhere, the fairy ball is something different. No fairy asked about the subject has ever given an answer that consisted of anything other than bald-faced lies and open scorn for the asker. Those present at the time reported seeing wicker chariots pulled by luna moths, hot air balloons propelled by harnessed bats, and sprays of durable soap bubbles with free-floating occupants. All these and other unusual methods of travel headed west over the forest.

Speculation ran rampant at the time: The ball was being held over the ocean. No, it was on the moon, in the secret moon city. It was in response to the millennium coming to an end. No, it happened every year. It was an ill omen, a promise of coming prosperity, a sure sign of rain, drought, or wind, and a "rotten nuisance" to stargazers trying to enjoy a clear night. No one could agree on any of the details, except that it had been seen. A few individuals have claimed to have been spirited away to the fairy ball, though such a story is impossible to prove. All but one acknowledge being eventually returned after the event. The remaining one insisted xie still resides in the secret moon city and politely inquired after my comfort in the moon atmosphere when I interviewed xem.

That's a taste of what July has to offer us. See you next month, when August brings the first harvests and a definitely-not-fictitious return to school.